- Digitization of information in all media has introduced significant challenges regarding how to deal with issues of intellectual property and copyright. Copyright regimes, and their associated business models, that worked effectively prior to the development of ICT are increasingly under threat, and in some cases rapidly becoming redundant.
- Systemically, ICT use is tending to accentuate social disparities between rich and poor.
Increasingly, investment in ICT is being seen by educational planners as a necessary part of establishing competitive advantage, because it is attractive to students (particularly in those parts of the world where young people have increasingly ubiquitous access to ICT) and because it is deemed essential by governments, parents, employers and other key funders of education. Despite this, it is becoming clear that there is no direct correlation between increased spending on ICT and improved performance of educational systems. Benefit and impact, to the extent that they can be reliably measured at all, are more a function of how ICT is deployed than what technologies are used. Hopefully, as this knowledge becomes more widespread, it will help educational systems around the world – whatever their current resourcing constraints – to harness ICT over the coming years to improve educational delivery and reduce its cost, rather than creating additional expenses, exacerbating operational complexities and generating new problems.
As part of the development of ICT, e-learning continues to grow in importance worldwide. Indeed, some educational planners see it as one of the few relatively unrestricted avenues for innovation in teaching and learning. The European eLearning Action Plan defines e-learning as follows:
- The use of new multimedia technologies and the Internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services as well as remote exchange and collaboration. (Commission of the European Communities 2001)
There has been a growing tendency to use 'distance education' and 'e-learning' interchangeably. However, the use of distance education and e-learning as interchangeable or composite phrases introduces a confusing conflation of the terms, which has sometimes led to poor quality strategic planning. It is true that introduction of ICT introduces a new range of educational strategies, but it remains a relatively simple matter to establish whether specific uses of ICT incorporate temporal and/or spatial separation. Thus, for example, students working independently through a CD-ROM or online course materials are clearly engaged in a distance education practice, while use of satellite-conferencing, although it allows a degree of spatial separation, has more in common with face-to-face education because it requires students to be in a specific place at a specific time. Many people harnessing ICT seem to think they are harnessing the benefits of good quality distance education, when often they are simply finding technological alternatives
for replicating traditional, face-to-face educational models.
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